musings on writings

I lgbtfest-ficced.

To this prompt: Harry Potter, Parvati or Padma Patil or Dean Thomas or Blaise Zabini (or anyone else who might fit), They're already a minority as one of Hogwarts' few non-white students. Is it worth coming out as LGBT and adding yet another minority to the list?

I started writing a Padma Patil/Luna Lovegood story, but that didn't work out, mostly because I was anxious about fucking up Marathi culture, so I made the Patils half-Bong, and then I realised that that was maybe worse, and writing a viciously intelligent, bibliophilic, introverted desi girl trying to map out her queerness... well, it cut far too close to the bone, is what.

So I wrote a fic about Blaise Zabini instead. It isn't that I wrote that as second-best; I didn't. I was wondering at one point whether I could write both without running myself into the ground, so it isn't that, exactly. It feels a little like cheating on the prompt, though. With the Patils, their Indian-ness, their desi-ness keeps them different, other, 'exotic', even in their own heads, not in a bad or derogatory fashion, but because they are part of both cultures, and their way of interacting with magic and/or their families is basically Indian (there is nothing that is basically Indian, but the desis on my f-list will probably understand what I'm attempting to convey). For Zabini, I don't get that, because he's basically British, in my head, for all his long-dead father might well have been Italian, or at least descended from Italians on his father's side. Because wizards discriminate by blood, I don't really see them also discriminating by colour. At least not Zabini's classmates. I can easily see a lot of the Muggleborns being racist, however, and the one racist slur in the story comes from a Muggleborn girl, who's boyfriend is black himself, and she's basically using the slur because it's the one thing she can think of, to throw at Zabini.

It isn't a bad story, I'm not dissatisfied with it, I didn't even feel the need to sit and take it to pieces and change 50% of the words. I like it better than I liked one of my lgbtfest pieces last year. It's a nice, solid story. It's just I think there should be more racism in it, and my Zabini is simply too cool-headed to be perturbed by these things; having some Muggleborn (or even pure-blood) comment about him wouldn't register: he knows he's better, he couldn't care less what someone not in his little circle thinks. And his circle, well, Malfoy could, and he's the one the rest of that little coven would follow. But my Draco is a little sweet on Blaise, and so nothing of that sort transpires.

I dunno. It's niggling at me.